SDN/NFV-Based Mobile Packet Core Network Architectures: A Survey

Abstract

The emergence of two new technologies, namely, software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), have radically changed the development of network functions and the evolution of network architectures. These two technologies bring to mobile operators the promises of reducing costs, enhancing network flexibility and scalability, and shortening the time-to-market of new applications and services. With the advent of SDN and NFV and their offered benefits, the mobile operators are gradually changing the way how they architect their mobile networks to cope with ever-increasing growth of data traffic, massive number of new devices and network accesses, and to pave the way toward the upcoming fifth generation networking. This survey aims at providing a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art research work, which leverages SDN and NFV into the most recent mobile packet core network architecture, evolved packet core. The research work is categorized into smaller groups according to a proposed four-dimensional taxonomy reflecting the: 1) architectural approach, 2) technology adoption, 3) functional implementation, and 4) deployment strategy. Thereafter, the research work is exhaustively compared based on the proposed taxonomy and some added attributes and criteria. Finally, this survey identifies and discusses some major challenges and open issues, such as scalability and reliability, optimal resource scheduling and allocation, management and orchestration, and network sharing and slicing that raise from the taxonomy and comparison tables that need to be further investigated and explored.

QoE Management of Multimedia Streaming Services in Future Networks: A Tutorial and Survey

“…Most of these use cases are based on those defined by the ETSI [156]. Some of the use cases from the academia include those pertaining to QoE-based multipath routing [157] or virtual function implementation for broadband remote access server [158], deep packet inspection [159], radio access network (RAN) [160]- [162], customer premises equipment (CPE) [163]- [165], evolved packet core (EPC) [166]- [168] and QoE monitoring through virtualized probes [60]. From the industry, key NFV implementations and products include the CloudNFV [169], Huawei NFV Open Lab [170], HP OpenNFV [171], Intel Open Network Platform (Intel ONP) [172], Cisco Open Network Strategy [173], Alcatel-Lucent CloudBand [174], [175], Broadcom Open NFV [176] and F5 Software Defined Application Services (F5 DAS) [13].…”

SDN‐based failure detection and recovery mechanism for 5G core networks

“…Currently, there are many research activities on 5G, including SDN/NFV-based core network. 5,6 Additionally, surveys on latency analysis and latency reduction approaches in Internet, 7 Cloud computing, 8,9 and, specifically, latency requirements and technologies for shortening latency for 5G are also available. These proposals often involve drastic changes in the network architecture.…”

Optimal management of reusable functional blocks in 5G superfluid networks

“…A second taxonomy includes the works investigating the virtualization of the radio access networks (see, eg, references herein [36][37][38][39][40][41] ). More in depth, Michalopoulos et al 38 advocate the need for a flexible network design for next generation networks.…”

“…One of the issues emerging so far is that the constraints (21), (23), (29), (32), (36), (41), and (42) are not linear. Non-linear constraints introduce an additional level of complexity.…”

“…The same strategy can be used also to linearize constraints (41) and (42), by introducing the following two sets of binary variables:…”